Rants and Raves

This is in reference to "The DVD Hack: What Next?," 4.Nov.1999. There is little reason to withhold DVD drives or movies because some coders threw together a program that omits the encryption.

It doesn't matter how well the information is encrypted, or how the drives are made, it will be cracked. Once someone on the prolevel has figured out how to bypass the security it won't be long until an easier-to-use "do it yourself" version appears on the Web, as either blueprints or a program. Enhancing security features only annoys the owners of older units, and causes crackers to throw together a newer crack.

Maybe if the hardware manufactures would volunteer a little support for Linux, this could have been delayed. It probably wouldn't have stopped it from happening, but the coders set out to write [a]player, not a security cracking device.